Stent-Based Antennas for Smart Stent Applications

Recently, smart stents attract lots of attentions by integrating different sensors with cardiovascular stents for detecting vascular restenosis or measuring the blood flow condition including blood pressures and blood velocity. Then, the measured medial signals can be transferred to the external monitoring systems via wireless communications including the RF front ends and antennas. Different antenna designs have been studied including magnetic-field-coupled resonant antennas, miniaturized embedded antennas, and stents acting as antennas. In this research, we proposed a helix-like stent antenna by considering the whole stent as an antenna for better radiation performances. The stent antenna was designed at 2.4 GHz for the minimum loss when transmitting through the body and human tissues. Meanwhile, the stent antenna had a omnidirectional radiation pattern which would be beneficial for arbitrary receiving angles.